Consumption
by LaMaupin
Summary: Myka has some literature related thinky thoughts at the end of 4x17.


[AN: This happened because I read books about the history of cancer to cope with my Warehouse feelings after 4x17. Spoilers for the end of 4x17. Obligatory note about how I don't own anything or anyone and probably got stuff wrong because much to my chagrin, I don't know everything about everything but I do my best etc etc etc.]

At least it's not leprosy.

That's the first thing she thinks. The first coherent thought that she can form, sitting there on the edge of an exam table, in the small, sterile room. It's slightly too cold, as these places always are, and the doctor is talking to her, at her, but she can't really process what he's saying. Something about tests and biopsies and ultrasounds. About possibilities and treatment options and outcomes. But all she can think is, at least it's not leprosy.

Her mind is racing around that single sentence, considering what this means, summoning images of having to tell the people she loves, her family, about this thing. This thing that's inside her, eating her alive, consuming her with her own cells gone rouge. But the words don't come.

The only words she can summon are someone else's. Words of a dead Russian that she read such a long time ago, in a modern Russian literature class that seems to belong in another life. Ignored for so long, but not forgotten, and like everything she's read, when she summons those words, they come back to her, as if she had read them yesterday.

Because right now, in this moment that seems to stretch into eternity, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's _Cancer Ward_ is the only source of words she has. Which strikes her as funny, in a way, because she knows that it's not a book about cancer, but rather it's a book about Stalin, and totalitarianism, and moral responsibility. But none of that matters, really because her mind reached out for something, anything that could help her process what she is being told, and this is what it found.

And it works, in a way, because Kostoglotov was being consumed by his cancer instead of his guilt, and that's how she's felt so often. Consumed. By her guilt and her grief for Sam, by endless wonder and all the promise and darkness held within it, by the sheer depth of her love for her family at the Warehouse, the family she had never wanted but now can't imaging living without, and by Helena. Helena's manipulation and betrayal, her loss and her pain, her love and her forgiveness. And so much more.

It was only a couple of weeks ago that she had to let Helena go once again. To let her chase a long dead dream. And seeing Helena like that, after so long, in the suburbs with a boyfriend and a daughter and a perfectly safe life had consumed Myka once again. With grief and loss and love and the bittersweet taste of sacrifice. So it is only fitting that her cells are consuming her from within. Replacing the healthy with the malignant until she would be merely a shell of who she once was.

She never thought these words would be relevant to her, because the last time she thought about them she was twenty and invincible, and allegorical novels about cancer and the politics of the Soviet Union would never be relevant to her life. She had thought she understood what Kostoglotov meant when he said that leprosy was worse than cancer, she had even written an essay defending the statement, but those words ring hollow to her now, slipping away in light of this new information.

Only now does she finally understands it. Because cancer is consuming her. It is hollowing her out and replacing her cell by cell, but at least it is of her. It is her own cells mutated beyond repair or recognition, but it is a product of who she is, of her life and her experiences. And even if it doesn't kill her, but rather leaves her permanently altered, it will at least leave her as herself. A mutated, scarred version of herself, but herself nonetheless. Myka Ophelia Bering.

And that, she thinks, is a far better fate than leprosy, a disease that invades and eats away at you until you can no longer be recognized, and parts of you are missing and beyond repair, and you die as only a shadow of yourself.

She is grateful that it's not leprosy, even though cancer carries with it the much more real threat of death, because she doesn't want to lose who she is, who she has become. She doesn't want to lose her family, or Helena, or even endless wonder, in all their beauty and imperfection and pain. She would much rather be consumed by them, by her own cells' betrayal, than be eaten away at by her guilt and sorrow, by a foreign invader.

But those are just the words of a dead Russian. For this, she needs her own words.

She doesn't want her own words, because that means she has to process the doctors words, or think about treatment options, or schedule a biopsy, or go back to the B&B and tell them that she's dying. And that's far too much to handle right now. But in all the fear and despair and anger she can feel looming just outside this moment, there is one small spot of hope. Because she knows the answer to Kostoglotov's question. She knows what's worse than cancer. At least she doesn't have leprosy.


End file.
